Google engineers generally have the freedom to make choices like that on their
own. There's no requirement for everyone to use the Official House Build
(tm) of Linux. So it would seem that the self-driving-car team liked Ubuntu
and used it.

It does seem weird in general that Ubuntu is so popular at Google, when Ubuntu
is basically just Debian with training wheels, and Google engineers tend to
be smart enough to not need training wheels.

True ... that's why I use Debian instead of rolling a Linux OS from scratch,
which I'm capable of doing. I'd rather spend my computer time getting stuff
done than futzing with the OS. Ubuntu is just too much though. Too much
crapware, and that Unity UI is almost as bad as Windows 8. So basically I'd
have to spend extra time turning it back into something usable. I don't like
having my time wasted.

I've been pretty happy with Linux Mint Debian Edition. The original Mint
is an enhanced version of Ubuntu (based on Debian); for the DE, they just
cut Ubuntu out of the loop and based it on Debian directly. It's not quite
as polished, but a lot snappier and a bit more flexible.

For the AWS Citadel instance I created, I picked a Debian image. I pretty
much have it configured, except for allowing a BBS ssh login without a password.
There's some setting hiding somewhere that won't let it take a blank password.
I forget where all I looked now; I'll have to take that up again.

I had it networked with my test system on my home PC (just based on IP address)
and it sort of worked. I could send mail messages back and forth, but the
room sharing wasn't quite there yet; I think there was at least one more place
to configure things.

That was one of the places I hit, but I think there's a PAM module setting
somewhere overriding it. The default config on the image allows ssh only
for the admin account using a key; opening it up beyond that without screwing
with things dramatically has been an interesting exercise. I have as far
as creating a bbs user and setting its shell to the citadel client (with rnano
as the external editor; don't judge me). I could live without a password-less
login, certainly, but it's just one extra step.

That was one of the places I hit, but I think there's a PAM module setting somewhere overriding it. The default config on the image allows ssh only for the admin account using a key; opening it up beyond that without screwing with things dramatically has been an interesting exercise. I have as far as creating a bbs user and setting its shell to the citadel client (with rnano as the external editor; don't judge me). I could live without a password-less login, certainly, but it's just one extra step.

I had to do a search on the net, but I found a post on a support forum that detailed replacing the entry in /etc/shadow for the encrypted password with another encrypted empty password.

Couple that with the sshd_config setting to allow empty passwords, you should be good.

There is some concern out there over the fact that even though more than a million Raspberry Pi boards have been sold, they're not having the effect that the project was intended to create -- flexible hobbyist computers for aspiring young techies to learn on. That may or may not be a problem.

well, the OLPC also didn't fly, but it inspired and created the netbook hype. catching up on that made microsoft totaly miss the tablet hype and greatlely set more fire on stillborn vista; even windows 7 got a real bad start due to them trying to make it somehow run on netbooks...

the pi proved that there actually is a market for cheap arm systems; and it gave XMBC an affordable home helping to smarten up dumbtv and raising the bar in terms of features & usability for smart tvs.

like the arduino proved that people want easy to use micro controllers, the price of the pi set the price tags for such poor micro controllers and now spawns the crossovers - powerfull arm systems able to controll embedded devices

There's nothing PREVENTING what it was designed for; it just turns out there
is more demand for it doing other things. I almost bought one last week,
but decided to play with a virtual Amazon server instead for now.

Just for teh lulz (or more realistically, to feed a dream of someday needing
more coverage) I turned my home server into a wireless access point by tossing
a wifi card into it and running hostapd.

Not exactly a walk in the park, but it wasn't that hard either. I needed
extra firmware for the card (firmware package was in the debian nonfree repo)
and I had to manually configure a beaconing frequency to get it to announce
itself at all.

So far I'm getting reception around the house that's roughly equivalent to
the wireless router in the same room as the server.